GLITCHES

May of 1983 finds sixty-eight-year-old Lulu Tanner Pomeroy reluctantly running her family’s café once more while recalling a past brimming with blessings and adversity.  Conceived on the night of the Ludlow Massacre as described in The Red-Winged Blackbird, reared on a ranch in Southwestern Colorado as depicted in her memoir Between Daylight and Dark, Lulu figures she’s faced about all that life could throw at her during the first half of the twentieth century.  But little has prepared the doyenne of Empyrean, Texas for the comedy of errors that entwine her and eleven family members and friends during Founders’ Weekend on “Silicon Prairie.”  Will these adventurers succumb to pitfalls they’ve helped create or transcend them?  Discover the surprising answers in Glitches, the rousing conclusion to the Red Wing Trilogy.

BACKSTORY: The seeds for Glitches were cast in 1982 with two short stories that I submitted for acceptance to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. I received mixed reviews on the stories at the conference. But the inspiration that I gained from rubbing shoulders with budding writers like myself and established authors like Stanley Elkin (who used one of my stories as the basis for a workshop) and Tim O’Brien (whom I sang “Moondance” with at the conference’s closing party) was priceless. Though not all a bed of roses, the Bread Loaf experience changed the way I taught my high school creative writing class and cemented my determination to write.

While I was contemplating expanding my Breadloaf short stories into a novel, I was reading Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine and became fascinated with the spell the design and marketing of a new micro-computer cast over many associate with their production. I began to ponder the effect a highly successful computer design and sales enterprise might have on what had always been an idyllic rural Texas community. Perhaps I could have a fanatical designer create an affordable, practical home computer and debut it during the centennial celebration of the founding of Empyrean. What if an architect in the city could design an extra-special glass foyer for the firm to use as a site for the debut. What if the wife of the enterprise’s CEO convinced him to place a risky sculpture by a renouned local artist in the foyer? What if the CEO’s son designed a bizarre piece of music for the festivities? What if? What if? What if? I had good friends who were architects and artists. I knew folks who were involved in computer design. Could I create friends and family members who were as dedicated to their individual truths as the CEO, the architect, the English professor, the artist and the computer designer? Sure. All I had to do was tell their stories and let them entwine.

A note on the origins of the singular approach to characterization in Glitches: In 1976 I completed a master’s thesis entitled Twisted: The Emergence of the Grotesque Hero in the Contemporary American Novel, 1919-1972. My study shows how Grotesque Heroes could evolve from grotesque victimhood in twelve 20th century American novels. The idea for the thesis came from Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 novel Winesburg, Ohio (the Empyrean, Texas of Glitches is an updated semi-version of Anderson’s fictional town.) Like the characters in Anderson’s work, the main characters in the selected novels in my thesis become entangled in the web of truth and lies which constitute America. The discrepancy between what each character clutches as a “self-truth” and what society practices preys upon these people so intensely that they become twisted—either physically, emotionally or mentally—into grotesques. That misshapen outlook on the American scene molds their characters and directs their behavior into what I called the grotesque victim or effigy. A Grotesque Hero emerges when the character finds a solution to his or her dilemma, not by escaping victimization, but by accepting it and making it work for him or her. Six of the main characters remain grotesque effigies; six become heroes.

In Glitches, I allow one of my major characters, an overly zealous English professor, to author Twisted in my stead. Mary Susan Zilly (daughter of Lulu and Gene Pomeroy) and eleven other inhabitants of Empyrean have either become grotesques or are showing signs. Their attempts to find a way to grow and even thrive within their overlapping dilemmas propel the final novel in the trilogy and make it a formidable work of Grotesque Heroism. Characterization through use of the grotesque makes it the unusual book that it is.

One other note on influence. As I was writing the first draft of Glitches, I borrowed several components from William Kennedy’s 1983 novel Ironweed. One was the use of ghosts. Throughout her life, the main character and driving force in Glitches—Lulu Broiles Tanner—consorts with ghosts—first, with the spirit of her mother in Between Daylight and Dark; second, with her husband, Gene, in Glitches. Mary Susan Zilly pens a poem entitled “Ghosts,” which is included on one of the last pages after the close of the novel. The poem helps explain the function of visits from the spirit world in my books. To me—and I’m assuming to Kennedy—ghosts personify memories—be they pleasant or horrifying—that are so palpable they seem real and highly influential.

Another item I acquired from Kennedy’s book is his use of the term empyrean. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, empyrean is the highest level of Heaven. I believe that Kennedy introduces it in one of the novel’s last paragraphs to remind readers that there’s a “divine” place for everyone, even inveterate rebrobates like main character Francis Phelan. I use empyrean semi-ironically as the name of the Texas town where Gene Pomeroy grew up, where he takes his wild Colorado bride to live, where they rear their child and run their cafe. From the time in 1945 when Lulu and Gene move to the town at the close of Between Daylight and Dark until the reader meets them again in May of 1983 in Glitches, the town of Empyrean has been transformed into “Silicon Prairie,” with the advent of a burgeoning micro-computer industry and the technological, social and cultural demands development entails. Is Empyrean a piece of paradise, Hell, or purgatory? You decide.